


let him go

by butterflysky



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Infinity War spoilers, M/M, Sam and Tony are just mentioned, Sort Of, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-06
Updated: 2018-05-06
Packaged: 2019-05-03 05:28:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,901
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14561898
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/butterflysky/pseuds/butterflysky
Summary: It starts on the train.(A time loop keeps stopping Steve from saving Bucky.)





	let him go

It starts high up on a train somewhere cold and remote, the wind arctic cold and whipping at skin, hair, anything not hidden under layers and layers of heavy fabric.

It happens fast, so fast Steve barely registers that Bucky’s picked up the shield until he hears the metallic _thwang_ of something hitting metal hard. He turns in time to see Bucky vanish somewhere outside — _outside_ , where there’s a drop so far down Steve’s stomach had turned just looking at it earlier.

Things blur after that. He’s hanging from the side of the train, his helmet discarded somewhere — he doesn’t know, or care, where — and it’s like his entire being, his whole world, has narrowed to one point, of Bucky barely hanging on, of his face, stricken with fear and his eyes so wide and Steve’s hand just—can’t—reach—

He pushes himself further, more than he should if he wants to live, so far he feels a momentary unbalancing as if he’s going to tip and fall himself (and it wouldn’t be so bad, he thinks, if they went together — they do everything together, they always have, to school together, to war together, it’d be fitting if they went to their death together) and then he stretches, and stretches, and—

—and his hand clasps Bucky’s, so cold and shaking so much Steve nearly loses his grip (he won’t, he can’t) and then he pulls and they both fall backwards into the train, flat on their backs, staring up at the corrugated metal ceiling and trying to process whatever the hell just happened.

“That was—” Bucky starts, stops. “Close.”

He sounds _scared_ , more scared than Steve has ever heard him. It feels wrong — he’s never known Bucky to be scared before, not when he’s tirelessly tracking him down in back alleys to save him from whatever fight he’s gotten himself into, not when he’s charging after him to destroy a Hydra base, and he shouldn’t be scared now, either. But it doesn’t matter, because he’s safe. He’s okay. Steve remembers, before the serum, when he was all skin and bone and he’d get sick what felt like every other day, and Bucky would make a show of rolling his eyes and muttering under his breath but would always, always slide in behind him in his little rickety bed at night in the apartment they shared and keep him warm, keep him safe, a solid and comfortable presence behind him that Steve had grown so used to that he’d thought he’d never have to live without it. All he’s ever wanted to do is pay that back (and he knows Bucky would _hate_ that he thought of it like that, that there was any notion of owing anything, because they gave pieces of themselves to the other freely, always, always) and he thinks, now, he’s managed to go someway towards balancing things between them.

“You’re okay,” Steve breathes, and Bucky turns just his head towards him, his hair flattening against the train floor, and they just look at each other for a moment, a long moment that stretches and stretches and Steve wishes he had some way to capture it, to keep it next to the picture of Peggy in his compass, and then—

And then he blinks, and from one second to the next things have changed, a jarring dislocation that ends with Steve watching Bucky fly out of the train again. There’s a moment where he doesn’t understand, where he can’t process it, where he thinks he’s fallen into some kind of fever dream (back in Brooklyn, and Bucky should be there with him to calm him down from another nightmare but he isn’t, he’s _outside_ ) and Steve runs, throws his helmet that’s reappeared on his head, and—

And Bucky falls.

***

Next time it happens, Steve’s gone through another jarring dislocation — from the 1940s to the 21st Century, and he’s adjusting, slowly, but this has knocked him into a tailspin and he thinks, again, of the train and of saving and not saving Bucky, and this time he will save him even if it kills him.

Bucky is staring at him with flat, dead eyes, eyes that don’t recognise him, that don’t seem to notice anything except a target and the best place to plunge a knife or fire a bullet.

Steve tries to talk to him as the helicarrier explodes around them. He sees the moment he gets through to him, the moment that _Bucky_ trickles back into the Winter Soldier’s eyes, and for a moment Steve feels a sharp rush of pure joy, like he hasn’t felt since before the war, and he switches his shield to his other hand and moves closer to his best friend, the presence that’s been missing in his life for 75 years, the ghost that’s haunting him now, and—

And Bucky’s — _the Winter Soldier’s_ — fist flies towards his face and Steve has time to blink and think _this will kill me_ before—

They’re facing each other again, and Steve can’t find his feet because it feels like someone — something — has picked him up and thrown him back to where they started this. He stumbles, sees the Winter Solider catalogue the movement, note a weakness even as he cradles his newly broken arm to his chest and winces against the pain (pain that _Steve_ caused, and that isn’t right, it’s going to take a lifetime to make up for that) and then Steve feels the weight of the last week hit him all at once and he can’t, he can’t do this anymore, he can’t fight Bucky and he can’t hurt him, so he drops his shield and lets it fall into the water.

And then, he falls after it, and a metal hand reaches far enough to grab him and do what Steve couldn’t. When Steve wakes up, Bucky is gone, vanished as if he’d dissolved into the air, and Sam is at his side and it helps, it helps so much, but all he can think is that he’s lost Bucky again.

***

Steve thinks it won’t happen again. Twice is enough, he thinks, more than enough for one lifetime — even a life as long as his.

He finds Bucky in Bucharest, and he refuses to let him go. He runs faster than he’s ever run to keep up with the Black Panther, he runs even though he knows he’s running himself into trouble (not just trouble, he thinks, something more than trouble, but it won’t matter if he can get to Bucky because they’ll face it together) and then he has to watch Bucky get arrested, has to watch him vanish somewhere in a cold and impersonal facility, has to fight him again, but he still refuses to let him go.

They fall together this time. Bucky’s unconscious, Steve can see it straight away, can see that the fearsome Winter Soldier has gone limp as the rag dolls the girls in their street used to sew during the early years of the war, and Steve drags him to the surface and holds him tight against his chest, like Bucky would do for him all those years (a lifetime) ago.

And he still refuses to let him go. At the airport, in Siberia (he tells him to go, though, and that’s different, he thinks, desperately, as he watches Bucky run for his life) and when Tony won’t stop, Steve still fights. He’s helping to rip their team apart even further, but it doesn’t matter, _it doesn’t matter_ , because Bucky is lying motionless on the floor and time hasn’t reset and Steve wishes with a sharp, aching longing that it would, just this once, reset things in his favour and let him save Bucky _just this once_.

It doesn’t. But it’s okay, he thinks, still frantically desperate, because Tony’s suit has lost its power and Bucky is blinking — slowly, but blinking — and he moves when Steve approaches him and lets Steve drape him over one shoulder and hold him up in the way he’s been trying to for years but has never, ever been allowed to. Tony shouts after him, words that would’ve hurt a few days ago, but now it feels like a relief. He drops his shield — the thing that started it all, that Bucky was holding when he got flung from the train, that the Winter Soldier ripped and twisted from his hands and used against him — and he limps away with Bucky quiet beside him.

***

“I didn’t let you go,” Steve says to Bucky, one night in Wakanda, in the house T’Challa has given him nestled in quiet fields. It’s peaceful, Steve thinks, as peaceful as Clint’s farm had been for the little while they’d stayed there. Steve had been trying to find home, then, but he thinks he’s found it now (found _him_ now).

“What?” Bucky asks, half listening, eyes on the book in his hand (“I’ve got seventy years of these things to catch up on, Steve, can you believe how many there are?”).

“I didn’t let you go,” Steve repeats, and Bucky snaps the book shut and puts it beside him. “The hell are you talking about?” he asks, but it’s warm.

“I let you go on the train,” Steve says, and Bucky’s face starts to close in on itself, but Steve forges on anyway, “and I let you go after the helicarrier—”

“You were _unconscious_ ,” Bucky says, “and no one could’ve caught me on that train, it was my stupid fault for—”

“—but I wouldn’t let you go this time,” Steve says, still stubborn to a fault, and Bucky stops and his mouth thins as he presses his lips together. “I’ve finally saved you.”

“It’s not your job to save me,” Bucky says, and then, brighter, falser, like he’s trying to lighten the mood, “Your job’s to save the world, remember?”

_Not anymore_ , Steve thinks, not since the Accords. But, looking at the fragile, hopeful look on Bucky’s face (hopeful that Steve will drop it, that they can talk about something different, forget about it all for another night) he doesn’t have the heart to keep talking, and, anyway, he’s said his piece.

“Your the one with memory problems,” Steve says, and it startles a laugh out of Bucky, and then they slide right back into an easy back and forth about everything and nothing, like everything and nothing has changed.

***

Steve doesn’t realise it’s happened again until after it’s happened.

“Steve—” Bucky says, and he turns, expectant, still inwardly, quietly thrilled that they’re together in the future, that he can talk to Bucky whenever he wants now (and not only in the middle of the night, a kind of half prayer that he hoped Bucky could hear in whatever came after life, although he’d stopped that when he saw the Winter Soldier’s mask drop from his face) and he sees Bucky looking at his arm, confused, and he opens his mouth to say something else when he—

He vanishes.

Well, not vanishes. Crumples. Falls in on himself, and then he’s gone. Steve hurries closer, stops, crouches and puts a tentative hand to the dirt. It doesn’t make any sense.

“The time stone,” Thor says. “He used it. Vision—”

Time. Steve’s hand clenches in the dirt, in the ash. Time. Again. It’s happened again. He wouldn’t let Bucky go, so the universe made him. Again.

 


End file.
